Commercial aircraft passengers are increasingly demanding In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) and electrical power outlets to operate various electronic devices, such as lap top computers at their seats. To provide the passenger with such features, the electrical power and data must be delivered to each seat. Conventionally, power and data are delivered to aircraft passenger seats via numerous cables that, during aircraft assembly, are laid out in position on the floor of the aircraft passenger cabin. A portion of the cables is positioned beneath a covering, such as a seat track cover, and a portion that includes connectors to the seats is left exposed to connect with the yet to be installed seat groups containing each passenger seat.
During installation of the seat groups, the seat groups must be carried in over the exposed wires. Taking care to avoid the exposed wires increases both the complexity of the operation and the amount of time required to install the seats. Once the seats are installed, installers must crawl along the floor of the aircraft to manually attach each wire to each seat group. This process is cumbersome and time consuming. Further, in order to change the configuration of the seats or to replace the seats, an installer must again crawl along the floor, disconnect the wiring from each group, and maneuver the seats around the exposed wiring. Still further, in order to change the position of the seat groups, the aircraft must be rewired so that the wiring will reach the seats in their new positions. As would be expected, rewiring an aircraft is a costly and time consuming process.
Several methods have been developed to overcome the deficiencies noted above. An example of this includes a U.S. patent application entitled PASSENGER CABIN SEAT POWER BUS, (Ser. No. 11/090,874), filed Mar. 25, 2005, the enclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. Various designs of a power bus and a seat track connection device are disclosed there within. Although the devices disclosed therein provide an improvement over the prior art, it is desirable to provide an improved device for delivering power to aircraft passenger seat groups that both eliminates the need to separately connect each seat group to an individual power or data cable and the need to rewire the cables if the seat configuration is changed, as well as further simplify the seat installation procedure, as well as simplify a procedure for shifting the seats to reconfigure the seating arrangement.